We (gamers) and developers should be asking themselves the following question: "Why are these people ignoring AAA games in favor of cheap, $1 games on their phone?"

And no, the answer isn't as simple as "hurr hurr casualz!", because plenty of seasoned gamers are also playing mobile games. There has to be a reason why these cheap/free games are commanding more playtime than big-budget games.

While I wouldn't say never, as the author has and his reasons seem to be subjective, the fact remains that cheap and free do not equate well to a AAA title. There is no real bridge to be gaped to make up that distinction in game quality, as AAA is just too expensive to produce now, and expensive production costs means that the games won't be $1-5.

There will definitely be a much bigger place for mobile gaming in the future, that's pretty obvious, but even the mobile only developers realize that they will never replace console style games in the hearts of most gamers. It's not even their intention to do so.

However, there is a definite possibility that the two could come together in such a way that the best of both worlds are offered, and in this way you could see these mobile devices delivering a console experience. The games will likely not be any cheaper than a console AAA title is now though. When that time comes something new will emerge and people will just say it's the future, when in reality technologies always tend to merge and grow off of one another.

They go for the biggest number of sales from the lowest development cost :(

Some studios will make proper games just because of the developers' lust for the art form though, but in that case - why go for mobile devices?

I think that good, in-depth, games will do well on mobile devices when the current casual market get a bit fed up with the mehness and get interested in something better. I want to see some cool 3D platformer games like the ones of old on PS1 and N64! (I making one...)

Think about the casual gaming market and how they don't care for high performance....

More and more people are being exposed to the situation where they have a computing device on them all the time capable of running games. It would be pretty easy to make a cool game like mario kart that could stream to TVs from one phone and let people use phones or different controllers to play. Provided that the market is big enough, there will be a lot of good games that target that market. They don't even have to be party style games etc.

Eventually mobile devices will have so much performance that it isn't really worth having a console or PC unless you need to run cutting-edge software. Workstations will just have a kbd, monitor and mouse - your phone just wirelessly deals with it all (this can easily be set up now, but it'd only be good for office/browsing etc.). There will still be hundreds of millions of people wanting high-end graphics though (which, will be crazy-good raytraced graphics by then; with mobile devices outperforming high-end PCs of today)

"Eventually mobile devices will have so much performance that it isn't really worth having a console or PC unless you need to run cutting-edge software"

When will that point be reached? We are constantly getting bigger games and needing bigger hardware. Games on reasonably priced mobile devices will ALWAYS be like "Tiki Racing" compared to racing simulators on console/PC.

Sure, mobile devices WILL outdo modern computers in time. But computers will also be evolving.

And as long as mobile devices continue to rely on touchscreens, they will still never match the experience on PC/console.

Eventually both mobile and traditional computing devices will be able to compute entire galaxies while rendering them at 60fps. At that point, it makes no difference if you "only" have the weaker power of a mobile device. The human eye would have to evolve more before we would need more graphical detail (and yes, I mean on a monitor/tv not on a handheld screen), and AI/Physics are not a problem at all on PC games today, they won't be even remotely an issue for next gen consoles either (unless they cheap out on RAM - which they won't because it makes sense to directly follow the architecture of PC hardware today). The only thing capping performance is graphics, for which the requirements are capped by the human eye.

So, desktops will only be useful for compiling stuff, building system resources (like maps for games), rendering raytraced scenes (could do lower quality 60fps raytracing too - but it'll look worse than raster graphics, even on mobile devices), scientific computing etc. In fact, that might just all be done by servers, or the "cloud" because you only need a chunk of the system's time at that level of performance so it makes sense to share a cluster with other people - this is already viable and useful right now, it's cheaper to use Amazon's cloud computing than run your own high-end systems unless you need to load them 100% all the time. Also, if they killed the TV spectrum of radio frequencies when they should have (but billionaires want their money, so it didn't happen), 100mbps wireless internet would be prevalent (eventually TV will be killed and the spectrum will be opened up for better use - including TV within a fraction of the spectrum it currently uses) - meaning it's no issue to stream your resources (for maps, that will be GBs of textures etc.) to a "cloud" device for it to do some calculations with.